Diving Into Innovative Learning Solutions And Ever-Changing Tech Ecosystems
Hassan Mourad is Partner and Director of Tech Innovation at Kashida and has been driving advancements within the company since 2011. Today, he speaks with us about developing custom eLearning in a world of self-authoring, GenAI, and hundreds of authoring tools and learning platforms. He also sheds light on the importance of each of the components that make up a great learning experience, and how multi-disciplinary teams play a crucial role in the process.
Based on your experience, what have been some of the most significant changes in the world of custom learning development since GenAI came onto the scene?
The eLearning industry is, as it’s always been, heavily influenced by advancements in the tech landscape. The introduction of GenAI is no exception, as evident by its quick adoption by many players in the EdTech space as well as its integration into existing tech solutions as advanced features or plugins. While it’s always refreshing and exciting to see such dynamism in the eLearning industry, learning content creators should note that this early and quick adoption is mostly driven by a fiercely competitive rush, by product owners, to market an AI-based solution. Right now, this space is very busy and cluttered with a lot of marketing jargon, buzzwords, and a wide variety of GenAI-labeled offerings ranging from the useless to the nice-to-haves and to some very exciting and effective solutions. The market will try and test, and we will soon see very high-value solutions take center stage.
In my opinion, the primary objective of great learning content creators is, and will always be, to deliver value to their learners. They will always look for tech solutions to facilitate their work to achieve this objective faster, easier, and with higher quality. AI-based tools have the potential to be game changers for content creators if regarded as such.
Can you highlight a few of the key components that make up a great learning experience? What’s the importance of having a multi-disciplinary team involved in the development process?
It should go without saying that there is no value to the learning experience without good and reliable content acquired from credible sources and/or experts in the subject matter. This, coincidentally, is one of the major risks in the use of Gen AI tools as sources of knowledge when the tools are not trained to source information from pre-defined credible sources.
Transforming raw content into great learning experiences is a process where a Learning Experience Designer (LXD) plays a pivotal role in orchestrating a series of activities involving Subject Matter Experts (SME), key stakeholders, and visual design, development, and production teams to design the learning experience. This design process may include fact-finding/discovery activities such as focus groups, surveys, and polls, and design thinking workshops. An LXD is typically an expert in learning theories and effective learning methodologies, allowing them to consider all information they’ve gathered about the learning content and the target learners to design the learning experience. A learning experience will utilize the right learning methods mapped against the learning and enabling objectives of the content. LXDs are also designing against a set of limitations and constraints such as budget, time, resource availability, learning delivery technologies being used, etc.
As we never assume an SME has the right set of skills to play the role of an LXD in this design process, we also never assume that an LXD has the skillset to produce the learning experience they’ve designed. A well-designed learning experience deserves to be equally well-produced. As such, a mix of professional production resources such as visual designers, developers, linguists, audio/video production facilities and talent, multimedia editors and designers, illustrators, and animators may be involved in the production and development process.
Finally, to make the learning experience available for learners on web accessible learning delivery platforms, a range of expertise may be required starting from simple content authoring on a Learning Management System (LMS), to web and integration developers in cases where third-party tools are utilized in the learning journey for example, to cloud infrastructure experts when the server, storage, or security infrastructure is impacted by the course delivery.
What is one of your standout custom eLearning client success stories?
“Ajyal,” a CSR initiative for financial literacy, demonstrates our transformative approach to learning. Ajyal was originally designed for face-to-face delivery and was seamlessly transformed into an online program in response to COVID-19 lockdowns.
By applying our adaptive learning experience design process, we were able to preserve the existing inquiry-based approach while also allowing learners to choose between self-paced or instructor-led modes, ensuring flexibility in delivery.
In addition to overcoming the accessibility challenges presented by the pandemic, the transformation of the course led to increased reach and engagement with the learners. This only happens when we stand by our commitment to empowering learners and focusing on delivering the greatest impact regardless of the delivery method.
Can you tell us a bit more about Kashida’s end-to-end services for creating custom learning content and what that includes?
Linking back to my previous response on the diverse skills required for the development of custom learning content, our end-to-end services are categorized into Learning Strategy, Learning Experience Design, Learning Content Production, and Learning Delivery and Tech. Our team of experts is enabled with this mature set of modular services, product offerings, and processes that guide their work through the end-to-end content strategy, design, and development journey.
We develop our service and product offerings to meet three criteria:
- Stand-alone value. Each offering should independently deliver value, contributing to an enhanced learning experience. For example, we may be hired to design a learning experience as a stand-alone service for a client who plans to produce the digital learning assets with their in-house team.
- Integrated value. All our offerings integrate into our end-to-end processes for the design, development, and delivery of learning experiences, creating value that is greater than the sum of its parts. Naturally, we strongly believe that our engagement across the whole process guarantees the maximum value to our clients. As such, we pay special attention to developing the connections between the different services we offer to ensure smooth and effective handshaking between them. For example, outputs of our Learning Experience Design service include content writing sheets to guide SMEs through the content writing process and multiple developer files to guide production teams through the learning asset production process.
- Adaptability. Since our focus is on creating custom content, all our services are designed with a level of adaptability to cater to many different contexts and limitations. This also guarantees that we are able to apply continuous enhancements to our services and offerings as markets and learner interests change over time.
Self-authoring is gaining traction in the world of content creation, but what do you think sets serious creators apart from the rest?
Self-authoring is great! Never has humanity been able to disseminate so much information and share so much knowledge so easily and so quickly… Content authoring tech is a huge contributor to the explosion of self-authored content; a plethora of tools are out there allowing content authors with very limited skills and resources to roll out their content on digital platforms of all kinds. The most recent disruption to this space is, of course, brought on by GenAI, which makes self-authoring infinitely easier and quicker! The value of self-authoring within this context should be recognized and preserved.
There is, however, a case against self-authoring in the sense that it’s simply not enough, especially within the context of learning content. We’ve demonstrated this in a recent blog post where we consider some of the common types of content/creators on social media with their typical authoring processes and we provide a commentary on the sufficiency of self-authoring for each of the cases.
We find that in most cases, even on social media, self-authoring has a place and value, but it’s rarely sufficient as the creator’s objectives grow past personal limits to more commercial results/impact-driven objectives.
For learning content, the assumed objective is always to deliver impact and effectively disseminate knowledge to learners, making it a clear case where delivering serious learning impact will always require serious authoring and the investment in serious learning delivery tech.
Self-authoring, of course, remains an encouraged practice for experts who would like to share their knowledge freely with the limited resources they may have at their disposal.
Coincidentally, I came across an interesting perspective in a post on how some social media platforms respond to a rise in self-authored content made possible by GenAI: “AI-generated content flooded feeds, engagement became harder to earn, and algorithms started favoring interactions over reach.”
Wrapping Up
Thanks to Hassan Mourad for answering our questions and delving into custom eLearning development, end-to-end services, and GenAI in L&D. You can also check out how Kashida empowered the team at Nethope to utilize self-authoring capabilities with their new LMS and established visually engaging templates to produce a highly interactive and engaging course without the need for external authoring tools.
Last but not least, we’d like to congratulate Kashida for earning a spot on our Top Content Providers For Custom eLearning list.
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